Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a memoir about reading and writing and immigration and isolation and mental health. The title comes from an entry in Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks, a reminder to Li why she does not want to stop writing and what writing a book is about.
Li had suicidal depression while writing this book, and the quote below encapsulates the heart of the book. For her, being a writer is important, but being a reader is much more so, and reading itself is connected to the choice to live or die.
“I do not equate writing with real life … but I am unable to articulate what real life is. … Of course writing is essential for a writer, and being read, too …. Writing is an option, so is not writing; being read is a possibility, so is not being read. Reading, however, I equate with real life: life can be opened and closed like a book; living is a choice, so is not living.”
(Li’s most recent book, Where Reasons Die, is a novel about a mother conversing with her son who died by suicide. Li’s son died by suicide shortly before she wrote it. I didn’t know this until after I read Dear Friend. I haven’t read the novel yet, nor any of her other books.)
This passage complicates the idea of being isolated and present in our lives only while reading:
“I spent my days reading novels whose characters crossed paths only in my mind; I was reading writers’ diaries and biographies connected by footnotes. I did not see people outside the household often; I did not talk with anyone but one friend by phone. Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger. But what if one’s real context is in books? Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one’s days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.”
So much of the book is about how to connect with others and how much we can really know of each other. But are we achieving what we intend with what we write? Although books can provide so much pleasure, is it perhaps better to remain silent?
“I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone’s decision against silence. Still, I am greedy for what I am deprived: I have a friend who erases many sentences before putting down one; another friend keeps her thoughts to herself. Yet I believe that there is truth that is truer in the unexpressed; having spoken, I am apprehensive that I no longer have a claim to that truth. Why then write to trap oneself?”
There is nothing easy or conclusive in this book. However, there are sentences scattered throughout the book that read almost like aphorisms:
“To read oneself into another person’s tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.”
“For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I am reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.”
“Uncharitably one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much; uncharitably one writes to become closer to that feeling self.”
“Is it really to express myself that I write? Not if I think about what it is in myself that needs to be expressed: hardly anything new. This tireless drive to write must have something to do with what cannot be told.”
“Writing is a confusing business. One’s inner clock, set to an exclusively private time, is bound only to what one writes. Life is lived in a different time zone. Caught in between one’s family. To protect them from the internal clock, one risks alienating them; to include them, one risks intrusion.”
“Writing, as long as it is one’s private freedom, will always be disloyalty.”
Finally, I love this counterpoint to Susan Orlean’s perspective in The Library Book, about writing a book being protection against being forgotten:
“The possibility of being remembered, however, alarms me — it is not from the wish for erasure, but the fear that people’s memories will erase something essential. Expectations met and unmet, interpretations sensible and skewed, understanding granted or withheld, scrutiny out of kindness and malevolence — all these require one to actively accommodate others’ memories. Why not turn away from such intricacy? The less I offer you to remember, the better I can remember you.”
My copy of the book came from the library, but when Scott checked it out for me (a belated credit to him for checking out nearly all those library books I mention borrowing in my last post), for some reason it didn’t register to my account, so in theory I could keep my borrowed copy forever. I stuck it full of sticky notes when I read it earlier this month, so now I have taken my notes and am finally ready to give it back. But not before having bought my own copy.